A quietly thrilling and rare new voice is among us. In this seamlessly coherent and assured selection of prose poems, Laura Ann Reed offers a sense of interiority, liminal mystery, and shimmering intimacy as alluring as her approach to processing trauma and confusion is fearless and layered. Bookending, punctuating and amplifying memory and autobiography are a series of perfectly-aligned ekphrastics that allow new insight into artists like Sargent, Da Vinci and Bonnard just as they further inform, clarify, and complicate the poems based in event and situation. This expansive intertwining, both recursive and propulsive, laced through with intriguing imagery and turns of phrase, vulnerable invitations, and distance-shattering rhetorical moves, weaves a dreamlike and yet wholly-grounded spell that beckons us to enter, like a wave poised to envelope its readers, again and again.
--Sarah Maclay, author of Nightfall Marginalia
Like a master painter sketching a series of gestures, Laura Ann Reed writes toward truth, toward energy, embracing the veracity of fleeting, lush images rather than false resolution. Each prose poem is a “space opening” from memory to the present. As “she struggles to retrieve something velvet in herself that vanished,” the speaker returns to her dead infant sister, childhood exile, an old lover, and fog-covered hills. Each Abrasion Inside Love is full of desire and juxtaposition, crafted in tonal strokes, and “edgeless”—these poems seem to rise from the page.
—Chelsea B. DesAutels, author of A Dangerous Place
Throughout Each Abrasion Inside Love, it is in the lucid space of memory that we see a tendering of both nostalgia and grief. There is an insistence in finding a steady gaze in looking at lived and inherited traumas, and a care in acknowledging the fragility around the ghosts that these moments leave. These poems exist in the in-betweens—the moments of hesitation before seeing. In its inquisitiveness, this collection teaches of transcending with unwavering loyalty. Through a diligent circling we feel the speaker’s sense of reasoning and certainty as Reed writes, “because guilt / is an obsession.” These poems transport us, while simultaneously awakening us to what is before us.
— Sara Lupita Olivares, author of Migratory Sound
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Laura Ann Reed is the author of the chapbook, Homage to Kafka, (Poetry Box, 2023) and the poem sequence, Nelly Sachs Cycle: A Circling (forthcoming from The Pasticheur.) Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals including Sontag Mag, Cathexis Northwest, wildness (England), The Laurel Review, Persimmon Tree, The Pasticheur: Literature, Arts & Ideas, and Trace Fossils Review, as well as in twelve anthologies including Poetry of Presence II (Grayson Books, 2023), 2026 World Poetry Day Anthology, (Moonstone Publishing, 2026) and The Wonder of Small Things (Storey Publishing, 2023) Reed holds master’s degrees in clinical psychology and performing arts. She was born in Berkeley, California and she earned her B.A. from The University of California, Berkeley, which included a year at l’Université Aix-Marseille in France. She lives with her husband, Grant Reed, in the Pacific Northwest.